Senior Data Engineer

We’re 1st Central, a market‑leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology h has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too!

Are you ready to make a real impact in a fast‑paced, innovative environment? This is your opportunity to step into a pivotal role where your expertise will shape the future of cutting‑edge platforms and products.

We’re on the lookout for a Senior Data Engineer who’s not only passionate about data but thrives on solving complex challenges, driving innovation, and collaborating with forward‑thinking technology teams. If you’re eager to push boundaries, influence strategy, and help build the next generation of data solutions, we want you on board.

In this hands‑on technical role, you’ll be responsible for building technical data solutions for various projects and persistent data products. You’ll design and implement complex data pipelines and manage database population, ensuring the data solutions align with the technical design and overall data platform patterns. Whilst the role does not include direct people management responsibilities, you’ll provide invaluable support, coaching and mentoring to data engineers and associate engineers, helping them develop and grow their skills.

This is a flexible hybrid role, with occasional visits to our offices in Salford Quays (Manchester) or Haywards Heath (West Sussex) when required. For those based further afield, we also welcome applications from remote UK‑based workers
. We offer excellent flexibility in working patterns and a company‑wide culture you can be proud to be part of.

We’re seeking candidates with strong PySpark, Python and SQL expertise
, if that sounds like you, apply today to explore this exciting opportunity.

• Data & Technology:You’ll have a deep passion for data, analytics and technology, along with proven experience in designing and managing metadata‑driven pipelines.
• Cloud Data Engineering
  :
  You’ll bring deep expertise in data engineering across modern cloud platforms, delivering scalable and robust solutions. With strong skills in Azure services — including Data Factory, Azure Functions, ADLS Gen2, Key Vault, Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool, and Azure SQL
  .
• Programming Expertise
  :
  Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, PySpark, C#, and Power Shell will set you apart.
• Self‑Starter
  :
  You proactively manage workloads, make informed decisions, and work independently to deliver results.
• Mentorship
  :
  You’ll lead by example, mentoring and inspiring fellow data professionals to grow and succeed.
• Data Lifecycle Expertise
  :
  You’ll appreciate the full data lifecycle and can demonstrate thoughtful upfront design while adhering to established standards and best practices.

• You’ll be responsible for contributing to the low‑level design of data solutions, taking high level solution architecture artefacts and translating them into workable designs and work packages.
• You’ll be responsible for assuring the quality of data pipelines and database solutions built by data engineers, and their alignment to solution designs, patterns, and standards.
• You’ll contribute to coding standards and design patterns for data engineers to follow, ensuring safe, high quality, compliant code.
• You’ll develop high complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources.
• You’ll ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed, and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases.
• You’ll build data observability and data quality by design into all Data pipelines, promoting self‑testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies.
• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business…